After accepting your kind invitation to address this important and venerable forum, I received several calls to make sure that the title of my lecture was correct. The more I insisted that it was, the less sure, I suspect, that Dean Lindsay and her colleagues - who have do so much to internationalize Penn State and open the world for her students -- thought they had made a wise choice in inviting me. What, after all, do goats have to do with education? What is more, I first heard the phrase that inspired this talk in a taxi in New York City. While the Big Apple has many exotic things, I have yet to see a goat on First Avenue. So I agree: there is room for skepticism.
Goats, of course, live in villages. So perhaps, it is best to start there and not in the taxi.
For most of the world, what transpires on a college campus is very far from anything most people ever experience. Consider, for example, what the world would look like if it consisted of a single village in which just one hundred people lived. At present levels of development, and keeping all the ratios between the haves and the have nots the same, eighty persons would be living in poverty. Seventy could neither read nor write. Fifty would never have a full time job. Thirty would never attend even primary school and only one person would have a college education. And once in every two hundred years, one of those persons would have the chance to study abroad.
These stark numbers that tell us how very far the world has to go to lift most people out of poverty and get them to the point where they can participate in either education or the global economy. That is the bad news.
The good news is that all of this could change in our lifetime. I learned something about how in that taxi. It was one of those New York moments. The driver asked me what I did and when I explained that I was in education, he said he was just "out" of education. I asked what that meant. And I will get to his answer in a moment.
My main message today is that education will become the driving force of this century. This will happen because for the first time in history the cost of knowledge will be lower than the cost of ignorance. This dynamic will make for dramatic changes in the societal and governmental forces that retard progress in changing all the numbers we don't like. In the process, moreover, universities will play a leadership role. But viewed from the present, none of these outcomes appears immediately self-evident.
Universities are one of just three present-day institutions that existed for most of the Millennium just ended. The other two are religion and the British monarchy. None of these three institutions are known for being progressive and none of the historians who write about them argue that their remarkable staying power is due to openness to new ideas, especially those coming from foreign sources. As one colleague put it recently, each is like a "fortress built against the tide of time." The most important (and still surviving parts) of first academic spaces constructed in the Millennium just over were the walls which separated the scholars from the populace and the vaults which housed the books and manuscripts. Even today, our chief academic officer is generally called a Provost, which is a word of medieval origin that meant the keeper of a prison.
Striking a posture that limits access won't do for the future because there is going to be an explosion in demand. According to the research department at IIE, sometime between 2020 and 2035, more people will be ready for post-secondary education than went to university in all of human history. And as the President of the World Bank observed recently, we are heading into "a world where the communications revolution holds out the promise of universal access to knowledge."
The conjunction of these two dynamics is not entirely good news. At present, some 88 million students are enrolled in post-secondary educational institutions. Most universities are already operating at full capacity and those systems that have the resources to grow may well be located in the wrong place. American and European universities enroll more than half of all students but two thirds of the world's college-age population lives elsewhere. Only 7 percent of China's college age population has been able to find a seat in Chinese universities, and unfortunately there are fewer seats in all of that country's universities than there are in California. For Africa, the percentage is just 2. Qualified applicants already outnumber the seats available just about everywhere; but in many developing countries, the ratio is 60:1. Moreover, no country appears to have the resources to build campuses and train professors fast enough to meet demand.
The problem is that by 2010, the worldwide demand for higher education will increase to well over 100 million persons, according to a recent study by the British government. And by 2025, this number could be as high as 150 million.
Responding to this level of demand will require higher education systems everywhere to adopt a new paradigm. This will involve not only making it possible for more people to "go to college" in the traditional sense, but also for many more of them to receive the equivalent of a college education by connecting to the Internet. As that happens, according to Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers, "education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error."
This singular fact will change the nature of world politics, the map of the post-modern world, and the structure of the international system because power will be diffused more rapidly across cultures than across countries.
Responding to the demands for access to higher education in other countries will require out-of-the-box thinking. We cannot possibly accommodate all the qualified students from China and India that will be ready for college in the next decade, nor is there space for them in this hemisphere or in all of Europe. Education ministries will be unable to afford to build campuses along traditional lines or wait for enough Ph.D.s to be minted and apprenticed. What needs to be transferred at a very rapid rate is the knowledge of how things (such as economies, governments, and machines) work and how they can be applied to improve human society. We do this now via the Internet to bake bread, increase crop harvests, teach surgery, open historical archives, and manufacture simple as well as highly complex machines. The contents of a basic college education already exist in cyberspace. What needs to be created is the political will among education ministries and institutions to open their societies to new forms of knowledge delivery.
Which brings me back to the back of the taxi.
The cabbie said that he had a Ph.D. in history but was not teaching at the moment. There were no jobs for that back in his country. And, he said, come to think of it, he was unlikely to get a job in his field in the U.S. either. "No matter," he went on, "I sell goats."
"I come from Malawi. Back home, people measure their wealth and prestige in terms of the number of goats they have or are given. We have quite a community here in New York. When they want to do something good or important for their relatives back home, they buy them a goat. I have a direct line to a supplier. I am paid for a goat in New York, and I use the Internet to order the animal back home as well as buy the supplier things he wants and ship them to Malawi with the money I am paid. It is a lot easier to breed goats in Malawi than to buy a car and many other things that are freely available in New York. The supplier, my cousin, could never sell enough goats the old way to even buy a TV. Now there is almost nothing in New York that he cannot have."
There was, of course, much to challenge about what I had just heard. But we had come to my destination and the cabbie was clearly interested in making money and not giving me a further tutorial. One more question, I asked. Where did you figure out how to do all this?
"In the library. I started selling goats while working on my thesis. The Internet was always there and always free. And people kept asking me to get in touch with relatives back home for them."
So what was worth more? The Ph.D. degree or the possibility that the university opened up - quite unintentionally -- for the cabbie? The information age has created what Vaclav Havel calls an age where everything is possible and nothing is certain.
"When everyone can log on," as Vartan Gregorian wrote in the forward to the Carnegie Corporation's new magazine, " the Internet promises that no one will be cut off from ground-breaking scientific discoveries, literary achievements or the understanding of history -- the greatest library that the world has ever known will be open to everyone, every adult, every child. In time, the world's most wonderful ideas will be accessible to anyone who wants to learn." And to sell goats.
